Where There's Smoke

by Penny Grubb

  ‘Did I now?’ came a rasped response from above her; a breathy tone that was all that was left of Vince Sleeman’s voice.

  Annie could see the newcomer’s lower legs and feet as they tracked across the end of the bed; sturdy brown lace-up shoes emerged from under dark pinstriped trouser legs. She held her breath as he walked towards the window; towards Christa. The room lay silent but for the padding footsteps that didn’t stop at the window but walked on, right to the laundry pile. Then there came a small grunt of effort and the scraping of wood. Vince’s visitor pulled a chair round to the far side of the bed and sat down. Annie breathed out.

  It wouldn’t be a first to have to sit tight for a long time. Tense muscles would cramp. It wouldn’t help to dwell on the precariousness of her position. They didn’t know she was here. Sleeman was clearly left alone for long stretches. He was very ill. He’d be on his own and asleep at some point and she’d find a way out.

  ‘What’s the rush? I thought you must have pegged out,’ said the newcomer.

  ‘What do I know, stuck here?’ rasped Sleeman’s voice. ‘Maybe the boy’s come good.’

  Through the open window, the background sounds of the hunt for Christa continued, coming suddenly closer, as a voice shrieked, ‘Reg! Reg!’

  ‘And I’ve just sat down,’ murmured Sleeman’s visitor. ‘They give you no peace.’

  Annie watched the pinstriped legs haul themselves upright and stride back round the bed. She heard the scrape of the sash window open wide and felt the inrush of cold night air.

  ‘Bleeding hell,’ rasped the voice above her. ‘You’ll give me frigging pneumonia.’

  ‘It’ll make no odds, you’ll be dead soon enough,’ came the heartless response, then a shout, ‘Now, what’s the fuss?’

  ‘Where’d you park your car, Reg?’ a different voice called up.

  ‘There. Down by the blackthorn.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Reg. What d’you go and do that for?’

  ‘I’ll park where I frigging like. I’m not having your builders chuck bricks all over it.’

  In the cacophony of voices that replied, Annie couldn’t identify the speakers, but she caught the sense of what they said. And in amongst it all was a furious reference to ‘that stupid fat cow’ and her carelessness. They’d found Christa’s tampering and knew she’d hitched a ride with Pat. Hope eddied inside her, because that wasn’t all they’d said.

  ‘Oh, to hell with you,’ shouted the man at the window, crashing it shut and turning back to the bed. Sleeman rasped out a question, but Annie wasn’t listening to the exchange above her. This guy, Reg, had parked his car somewhere round the front of the house. And it had gone. She couldn’t believe her luck. The old guy’s car had been stolen and they all assumed it was Christa. They were still trapped, but the pressure of the search was off.

  Now how long would this old guy stay? Wouldn’t he want to get off and sort out his car? He’d closed the window and the atmosphere in the room was already thickening. Once she was alone again with Sleeman she’d give him a minute or so to drop off to sleep, and if he didn’t she was prepared to smother him to get Christa out. The front of the house was unused, unwatched. She’d heard them open the big front door and there’d been no alarm. Not only was the search for Christa focused on the old guy’s car, they now knew she’d arrived with Pat. They were looking for Christa on her own. Her escape route was ready.

  For a few minutes, as the noises from outside died away, the room remained silent but for a background whisper of gentle snores. Vince’s visitor sat still in his chair. Surely he wouldn’t stay much longer in the growing stagnation of the atmosphere. Annie risked moving her arm slowly to her face so she could rub at her nose and take away the constant tickle from the dust-laden air. She’d settled herself to face the direction of the door, though could see only a corner of it round the stand that held the huge TV, but she was aware of the inky blackness outside. If the old guy would just go, she would have great cover under the darkness of the night.

  As though responding to her thoughts, the feet in their brown lace-ups shuffled and planted themselves for standing. She listened hard for a break in the rhythm of gentle snores, but they whispered on uninterrupted. Then, as Reg got to his feet, a door banged downstairs, the clatter of heavy footsteps ran down the hallway and up the stairs. Seconds later the door burst open. A groan from above her signalled that Vince had been pulled rudely out of sleep.

  A second pair of feet came into view. She recognized the trainers as Carl’s even before he spoke.

  ‘What?’ his voice said, as though responding to a question she hadn’t heard.

  Above her the bed seemed to rock, and it took a moment for her to interpret this as almost silent laughter. The sounds strangled themselves into a coughing fit that Annie thought might carry Vince off to the next world.

  It didn’t appear to worry either of Vince’s visitors. Reg said, ‘You’d best take me home, nipper.’

  Carl gave a grunt that might have meant anything.

  ‘And what about my sodding car?’ Reg went on. ‘Arse end up in a dyke somewhere, I suppose.’

  Again, Carl just grunted.

  ‘Well, let’s get off. I’ll see you, Vince, if you last out.’

  ‘Not so bloody fast!’ Annie heard something of the old Vince Sleeman, though a racking cough cut through his speech. ‘You owe me a favour. And Reg here knows it.’

  ‘OK … OK.’ Carl sounded sulky.

  ‘So what’s with the Scots lass?’ Vince went on. ‘I’ve heard that many tales this last hour I don’t know if she’s on this earth or Fuller’s.’

  It took Annie a second to realize he was talking about her.

  As Carl started a reply, Vince cut across him. ‘Take my laundry with you. It’s stinking the place out. Go on, and we’ll call it quits.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You heard. Laundry. Over there.’

  No, thought Annie, as panic boiled up inside her. Don’t take the laundry. Open the window. Carl wouldn’t want to touch Vince’s soiled bedding. He’d open the window to freshen the room. She tried to will him to think of it as she watched the trainers cross the floor with his characteristic bouncy walk.

  If it were just the two old men, she’d be out from under the bed and silence them in a moment. But Carl was another matter. Could she find a weapon? Catch him from behind quickly enough to incapacitate him and give her time to stop Reg from calling for help. Vince was negligible. Already she detected the whispering snores. He could barely keep himself conscious. A pillow would shut him up.

  Could she distract Carl? Her phone. He was overdue in his call to her. He’d expect her to ring. But even if she could slip it out of her pocket without a sound, what if he answered? The room was too quiet. His voice would echo through her handset. Too late anyway. She saw his knees come into view as he crouched down. Clearly he’d kept his body very upright, his distaste clear in the hesitant way his hand reached forward.

  ‘Call it quits?’ he asked, pausing.

  ‘You heard,’ came the growl from the bed.

  Immobilized by the helplessness of her position, Annie could only watch as Carl’s hands reached again for the heap of laundry and made as though to gather it together.

  At once, he started back as though burnt. She heard him smother a gasp; watched as his hand reached forward again, his fingers just nipping the outer layer of cloth and pulling it up. She glimpsed Christa’s hair as the cloth was thrown back, covering her over again.

  Carl was on his feet. The room was silent but for the laboured breathing from the bed above her. Carl started to speak, but had to swallow and try a second time before any words came out.

  ‘Reg, take these.’

  Annie heard the jingle of keys.

  ‘Go out the back, get in my car, and drive it round the front.’

  It wasn’t clear whether a response would have come, but Vince’s voice rasped out. ‘Do as the boy says. And don’t hang ab
out.’

  Reg’s footsteps left the room, tracked across the anteroom and receded down the stairs. Annie hardly dared to breathe as the silence hung over the room, just the breath of gentle snores at the edge of hearing. Then Carl turned towards the window and yanked it open, allowing in a welcome blast of fresh air.

  A car engine started up. At once, Carl bent over the heap of bedding, pulling and tugging at the sheets, wrapping them tightly round the unconscious form hidden within, and lifted the bundle.

  For a second, Annie caught a glimpse of his face, side on, and could only freeze to immobility and hold her breath as she watched him hoist Christa aloft.

  Go carefully, she wanted to tell him. If Vince wakes, he’ll see it’s not just bedding.

  She watched and listened, hardly able to take it in. Carl’s steps down both staircases, the click of the front door, a car stopping then starting up again, driving off. He’d told her he would get Christa out if she were here and he’d done just that in a move that mirrored her own aborted plan.

  No time to figure it out or to puzzle over what was really going on. It was time to get herself out. She listened to the timbre of the sounds from the bed as she eased herself sideways, planning to creep out from the end of the bed nearest the door. That way she could remain out of Vince’s line of sight even if he woke.

  At the point of making her move she smothered a curse. Footsteps in the hallway, climbing the stairs. She eased back under the bed.

  The tread on the stairs was lighter than the others she’d heard. She hoped to hear it veer off, go somewhere else, retreat back down. But of course, it didn’t. It came closer and closer and she heard the door of the anteroom swing open.

  Annie had felt a weight lift when Carl had whisked Christa away, but, lying still, watching intently to see whose feet would appear this time, she felt her relief drain away. Her young colleague was in as much danger as ever. The only difference now was that Annie didn’t know where she was.

  Tiny feet. Child’s size, but not a child’s feet. It must be Leah.

  ‘You think machine’s never gonna bleep, don’t you?’

  It was the first time Annie had heard Leah clearly. Hers must have been one of the voices raised in the earlier commotion, but Annie didn’t recognize it in this clipped, precise speech. Nor did she recognize the accent, a strange mix of Yorkshire intonation and a voice that didn’t get itself happily around English structure. Leah didn’t sound European. The Sleeman clan, who she’d always assumed to be Yorkshire based, were an eclectic melting pot.

  Vince said nothing and his wife went on, ‘You think car crash victim lying on life-support waiting to give you his guts … ambulance come and whisk you off? Sad old man.’

  ‘Surely, there’s a donor on life support right now, isn’t there?’ Vince growled, his tone riled and heavy with distaste. Annie heard him put on a laugh. It was a mistake as it degenerated into another cadaverous coughing fit.

  ‘If not,’ said Leah, ‘you dead in few days.’

  She tensed as the tiny feet stepped close to the bed. Bits of the draped covers disappeared, shrinking the safe area under the bed. Leah was tucking in the sheets. Annie froze, her eyes tracking every move Leah made, ready to leap out the second she was spotted. She didn’t doubt she could overpower Leah, who was smaller than she was, but Pat’s fear played in her mind along with Carl’s strange deference to this tiny woman. Leah would be no pushover.

  The wifely concern over Vince’s comfort proved short-lived, no more than a token gesture. Leah stepped back from the bed and turned towards the door.

  ‘You been good husband,’ she commented. ‘Good husband to day you die.’

  ‘Feck off!’ Vince’s voice rose as close to a shout as Annie had heard and immediately crippled him in another choking fit so bad that surely Leah would come back, give him some water, do something, but she just laughed softly as she left the room and pulled the door closed behind her.

  CHAPTER 23

  Annie drove with the windows down all the way back to Hull desperate to shuck off the smell of the sick room and worried for Christa. It wasn’t until she hit the sleeping city’s outskirts that at last she heard her phone beep receipt of a text message.

  Almost two hours earlier she’d practically followed Leah back down the stairs, pausing only to be sure she was alone in the deserted part of the house before letting herself out of the front door and going with her original plan of hugging the wall of the building, creeping along the front to the corner and then making a break for the cover of the wilderness at the side. It was into the small hours by the time she broke free, the night now inky black, the sky a myriad of stars. But apart from the dying man upstairs, no one was asleep. Voices floated round from the back. Annie had tried to get a look, to see if light from the big window would show her the outline of Pat’s car or just an empty space where it had been. It was too dark to tell and too risky to creep closer. They must finally have shut the curtains, which had made her nervous. Voices shouldn’t carry from within a closed room. There must still be people out by the big shed, though that too had lain in darkness: no sign of the fierce light that had blazed out earlier.

  She first tried to ring Carl once she was well away from the house, but his phone went straight to voicemail. Trying at intervals as she jogged through the night, she eventually left a short message. ‘Where’s Christa? Five minutes to get back to me or else.’ She tried to inject menace into her tone, hoping he’d at least ring her back. She itched to tap in Scott’s number, to tell him her colleague had gone missing, drugged and kidnapped by various of the Sleemans, but what could she tell him that wouldn’t be neutralized by Christa’s record on the PNC and the intervention of Greaves and maybe others? She’d approached her car cautiously, but if they’d found it in the search for the car Christa had supposedly stolen, they hadn’t linked it to her. It sat where she’d left it.

  When at last she’d heard the text ping through, she’d pulled over to look. Yes, Carl Sleeman. Your mates OK. Was at office all along. Been on a bender.

  Angrily, she rang straight back, but again it was voicemail, so she texted, Bollox. If she’s not OK, you’re in real bother.

  His text told her one thing. He didn’t know she’d been out there if he thought she might swallow the lie that Christa had been in town all the time. She gunned the car back through the empty streets, pulling up outside Pat and Barbara’s office, clicking open the door as she pulled up. Then she paused. The car was still not linked to her, not by anyone who mattered. She shouldn’t leave it right outside. But the extra minutes to park it on a parallel street and cut back through the tenfoot might be life or death to Christa. She had to see if she was really here. Compromising, she raced it fifty metres up the road and sprinted back, wrestled the key in the lock and took the stairs two at a time as she clattered up, seeing nothing but dark rooms above her. As she fought to unlock the door to the main office a familiar sound reached her. Gentle, rhythmic snores. She swung the door open and snapped on the light. Christa had been dumped unceremoniously on the floor. She lay curled in the foetal position, fast asleep. Annie knelt down beside her and grasped her shoulder.

  ‘Christa, wake up. Come on. Wake up.’

  Nothing. Not even a break in the rhythm of her snoring. Christa’s jacket was still tied roughly round her the way Annie had left it. She untied the arms, pulled it free and laid it across the sleeping woman’s shoulders. A card fluttered free of one of the pockets and settled on the floor. Annie glanced at it as she reached for the cushion on Pat’s chair and eased it under Christa’s head. She needed to get Christa to the hospital, to get her treated for whatever the Sleemans had pumped her full of. But she needed to know what it was, and the only person she could ask was not answering his phone to her. Her gaze rested on the office phone, but no, he’d know it could only be her. The message light blinked at her so she reached across and hit the button. A stream of calls from impatient clients came through. Pat and Barbara had misse
d meetings, failed to return calls, ignored e-mails … nothing from Carl. Annie clicked it off.

  Running her hand through her hair in an agony of frustration, she looked at the now silent phone on Pat’s desk and at once she was back on her feet, pulling open the drawers. Pat usually kept a spare mobile in here somewhere. Yes! She pulled it out and jabbed in Carl’s number. He’d think it was Pat and he’d want to speak to her.

  He answered immediately. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘It’s Annie. I’m with Christa and don’t you dare hang up. What’s she been fed? That’s all I want to know. She’s bang out here.’

  ‘Chill out, fer Chris’sakes. She’s cool. They’ll have give it her intravenous. Just leave her be. She’ll sleep it out.’

  ‘I’m taking her straight to the hospital,’ Annie snapped. ‘And you’re going to tell me what she’s had so they know how to treat her.’

  ‘Is that right? For one, I haven’t a clue what she’s had. I wasn’t there.’ That was true, thought Annie, annoyance rising at his relaxed tone. ‘And for two, they’ll ask you some awkward questions if you take her in.’

  ‘Yeah, well maybe I’ll tell them just where she was …’ Even as she spoke the words, the scenario played in front of her. Supposing she told the tale and things went as far as an official visit to the farmhouse.

  Yes, some junkie broke in … she got away … why didn’t we report it? There’s a dying man upstairs … enough on our plates …

  Whatever they’d given Christa would likely be something that was there legitimately to treat Vince. And chances were, things wouldn’t get that far. Maybe the police would take more interest in the person who brought her unconscious friend to A&E. Her mind played bits of scenes where she tried to make her story sound convincing. Pat believed she’d been hired by Vince, but that wasn’t a story anyone else would believe. Barbara might know the truth but was in no fit state to tell anyone. At best, she might produce Carl Sleeman. And that wouldn’t win her any brownie points in official circles.